This is a transcript of the presentation given by
Thierry Meyssan on 8 April 2002 at the Zayed Center in Abu
Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), at a gathering organized under
the auspices of the Arab League and attended by the diplomatic
corps and the international press corps.

Your Highness, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

In the first minutes following the first attack on the World
Trade Center, officials suggested to the media that the
person behind the attacks was Osama bn Laden, the epitome of
Muslim fanaticism. Not long after, the recently appointed
director of the FBI, Robert Mueller III, designated nineteen
kamikazes by name and mobilized all the means at the
disposal of his agency to track down their accomplices. The
FBI thus never undertook any investigation but, instead,
organized a man hunt, which, in the eyes of much of the United
States public, quickly took on the appearance of an Arab
hunt. This reached such a pitch that people were incited to
attack  even kill  Arabs whom they naively considered
collectively responsible for the attacks.

There was no investigation by Congress, which, at the
request of the White House, renounced exercising its
constitutional role, supposedly in order not to adversely
affect national security. Nor was there investigation by any
media representatives, who had been summoned to the White
House and prevailed upon to abstain from following up any
leads lest such inquiries also adversely affect national
security.

If we analyze the attacks of September the eleventh, we
notice first off that there was much more to them than the
official version acknowledges.

1. We know about only four planes, whereas at one point it
was a question of eleven planes. Further, an
examination of the insider trading conducted in relation to
the attacks shows put-option speculative trading in the
stock of three airline companies: American Airlines, United
Airlines and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

2. The official version does not include the attack on the White House
annex, the Old Executive Office Building (called the "Eisenhower Building").
Yet, on the morning of the eleventh, ABC television broadcast, live, pictures
of a fire ravaging the presidential services building.

3. Neither does the official version take into account the collapse of
a third building in the Manhattan World Trade Center complex, independently
of the Twin Towers. This third building was not hit by a plane. However,
it, too, was ravaged by a fire before collapsing for an unknown reason.
This building contained the world's biggest secret CIA operations base,
where the Agency engaged in economic intelligence gathering that the
military-industrial lobby considered a waste of resources that should
have been devoted to strategic intelligence gathering.

If we look closely at the attack against the Pentagon, we
notice that the official version amounts to an enormous lie.

According to the Defense Department, a Boeing 757, all trace
of which had been lost somewhere over Ohio, flew some 500
kilometers (300 miles) without being noticed. It supposedly
entered Pentagon air space and descended on to the lawn
surrounding the heliport, bounced off the lawn, broke a wing
in collision with an electric transformer station, hit the
façade at the level of the ground floor and first story, and
was totally consumed by fire, leaving no other traces than
two dysfunctional black boxes and pieces of passengers'
bodies.

It is obviously impossible that a Boeing 757 could, for some
500 kilometers, escape detection by civil and military
radar, by fighter-bomber planes sent in pursuit of it and by
observation satellites that had just been activated.

It is also obviously impossible that a Boeing 757 could
enter the Pentagon's air space without being destroyed by
one or more of the five missile batteries protecting the
building.

When one examines the photographs of the façade, taken in
the minutes following the attack (even before the Arlington
civilian fire fighters had time to deploy), one sees no
trace of the right wing on fire in front of the façade, nor
any hole in the façade into which the plane could have been
swallowed up.

Apparently without the least fear of laying itself open to
ridicule, the Defense Department declared that the jet
engines, made out of tempered steel, had disintegrated under
the shock of the impact  without damaging the façade. The
aluminum of the fuselage is claimed to have combusted at
more than 2,500° Celsius within the building and to have
been transformed into gas, but the bodies of the passengers
which it contained were so little burned that they were
later identified from their finger prints.

Responding to journalists during a press conference at the
Pentagon, the fire chief claimed that "no voluminous debris
from the aircraft" had remained, "nor any piece of the
fuselage, nor anything of that sort". He declared that
neither he nor his men knew what had become of the aircraft.

Close examination of the official photographs of the scene
of the attack, taken and published by the Defense
Department, shows that no part of the Pentagon bears any
mark of an impact that could be attributed to the crash of a Boeing 757.

One must acknowledged the evidence: it is impossible that
the attack against the Pentagon on September 11, killing 125
persons, was carried out by a jet airliner.

The scene of the attack was thoroughly disturbed on the
following day by the immediate launch of new construction
work, with the result that many of the elements necessary to
reconstruct what had happened are missing. The elements that
do remain, however, converge in a single hypothesis that it
is not possible to prove with certainty.

An air traffic controller from Washington has testified
seeing on radar an object flying at about 800 kilometers per
hour, moving initially toward the White House, then turning
sharply toward the Pentagon, where it seemed to crash. The
air traffic controller has testified that the
characteristics of the flight were such that it could only
have been a military projectile.

Several hundred witnesses have claimed that they heard "a shrill noise like the noise of a fighter-bomber", but nothing like the noise of a civilian aircraft.

Eye-witnesses have said that they saw "something like a
cruise missile with wings" or a small flying object "like a
plane carrying eight or twelve persons".

The flying object penetrated the building without causing
major damage to the façade. It crossed several of the
building rings of the Pentagon, creating in each wall it
pierced a progressively bigger hole. The final hole,
perfectly circular, measured about one meter eighty in
diameter. When traversing the first ring of the Pentagon,
the object set off a fire, as gigantic as it was sudden.
Huge flames burst from the building licking the façades,
then they shrank back just as fast, leaving behind a cloud
of black soot. The fire spread through a part of the first
ring and along two perpendicular corridors. It was so sudden
that the fire protection system could not react.

All these testimonies and observations correspond to the
effects of an AGM[air to ground missile]-86C of the third
(most recent) generation of CALCM [conventional air-launched
cruise missile  see picture at
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/agm-86c.htm
 equipped with depleted uranium warheads and guided by GPS
[global positioning system]. This type of missile, seen from
the side, would easily remind one of a small civilian
airplane, but it is not a plane. It produces a shrill
whistle comparable to that of a fighter-bomber, can be
guided with enough accuracy to be directed through a window,
can pierce the most resistant armor and can set off a fire independent of its piercing effect  that will generate heat
of over 2,000° Celsius.

This type of missile was developed jointly by the Navy and
the Air Force and is fired from a plane. The missile used
against the Pentagon destroyed the part of the building
where the new Supreme Naval Command Center was being
installed. Following the attack, the Navy Chief of Staff failed to show up in the crisis room
of the National Military Joint Intelligence Center when the
other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported there.
Instead, he abruptly left the Pentagon.

Who, then, could have fired such a missile on the Pentagon?
The answer was given by the off-the-record revelations of
Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, and by Karl Rove,
senior advisor to the president, to journalists from the New
York Times and the Washington Post. Eighteen days later,
these men discounted the veracity of the information they
had given the journalists, claiming that they had been
speaking under the stress of great emotion.

According to those close to George W. Bush, in the course of
the morning, the Secret Service received a telephone call
from those behind the attacks, apparently in order to make
demands. To give credence to their demands, the masterminds
revealed the secret codes giving access to the secure
telephone lines available to the president for secure
communication with the various intelligence agencies and
services as well as for access to the nuclear arsenal. In fact, only a very few persons with the highest security
clearances, in the top ranks of the government, could have
had these codes. It follows that at least one of the persons
behind the attacks of September 11th has a top government
post, either civilian or military.

To give credence to the fable of Islamic terrorists, the
United States authorities invented kamikazes.

Although it would have been possible for a well organized
group of persons to bring firearms into commercial air
liners, the kamikazes apparently used cardboard cutters as
their only weapons. They are said to have learned to pilot
Boeing 757s and 767s in the space of several hours of
simulator training, becoming better pilots than
professionals. This mastery allowed them to carry out
complex in-flight approach maneuvers.

The Justice Department has never explained how it
established the list of the kamikazes. The airline companies
have furnished the exact number of passengers in each plane,
and the passenger lists, incomplete, do not mention the
persons who boarded at the last minute. In checking the
these lists, one notices that names of the kamikazes are not
on them and that only three passengers are not identified
for flight 11 and only two for flight 93. It is thus
impossible that 19 kamikazes boarded. Further, several of
those listed as kamikazes have turned up, alive. The FBI
nonetheless maintains that the hijackers have all been
definitively identified and that complementary information
such as birth dates makes it improbable that they could be
confused with persons of the same name. For those who might
doubt this, the FBI has a ridiculous proof: whereas the
planes burned and the Twin Towers collapsed, the passport of
Mohammed Atta was miraculously found intact on the smoking
ruins of the World Trade Center.

The existence of hijackers, whether these or others, is
confirmed by telephone calls made by several passengers to
members of their families. Unfortunately, these
conversations are known to us only by hearsay and have not
been published, even in the case of those that were
recorded. Thus, it has been impossible to verify that they
were actually made from a particular cell phone of from a
telephone on board. Here, too, we are asked to take the FBI
at its word.

Further, it was not indispensable to have hijackers to
carry out the attacks. The Global Hawk technology, developed
by the Air Force, makes it possible to take control of a
commercial airliner regardless of the intentions of its
pilot(s) and to direct it by remote control.

There remains the case of Osama bin Laden. If it is generally
admitted that he was a CIA agent or collaborator during the
war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the current
version of events claims that he turned coat and became
public enemy number one of the United States. This story
does not bear up under scrutiny either. The French daily Le
Figaro revealed that last July, Osmam bin Laden was a patient
at the American hospital in Dubai, where he was visited by
the head of CIA regional office. CBS television in the
United States has revealed that, on September 10th, Osama bin
Laden was undergoing dialysis at the Rawalpindi military
hospital, under the protection of the Pakistani army. And
the renown French journalist Michel Peyrard, who was a
prisoner of the Taliban, has recounted how, last November,
Osama bin Laden was living openly in Jalalabad while the
United States was bombing other regions of the country. It
is difficult to believe that the greatest army in the world,
come to Afghanistan to arrest him, was unable to do so,
while Mullah Omar was able to escape from United States
military forces on a moped.

In view of the elements that I have just presented, it
appears that the attacks of September 11th cannot be attributed
to foreign terrorists from the Arab-Muslim world  even if
some of those involved might have been Muslim  but [rather] to
United States terrorists.

The day after the attacks of September 11th, United Nations
Security Council Resolution 1368 acknowledged "the inherent
right of individual or collective self-defense in accordance
with the Charter", calling on "all States to work together
urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers
and sponsors of these terrorist attacks and stresses that
those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the
perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be
held accountable".

If one wishes to heed the call of the Security Council, to
enforce Resolution 1368 and to punish those who really are
guilty, the only way to accurately identify the guilty
parties is to set up a commission of inquiry whose
independence and objectivity are guaranteed by the United
Nations. This would also be the only way to preserve
international peace. In the meantime, Your Highness,
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, the foreign military
interventions of the United States of America are devoid of
any basis in international law, whether it be their recent
intervention in Afghanistan or their announced interventions
in Iran, Iraq and in numerous other countries.